The strength of strong ties: How co-authorship affect productivity of academic economists

Increased specialization and extensive collaboration are common behaviours in the scientific community, as well as the evaluation of scientific research based on bibliometric indicators. This paper aims to analyse the effect of collaboration (co-authorship) on the scientific output of Italian economists. We use Social Network Analysis to investigate the structure of co-authorship, and econometric analysis to explain the productivity of individual Italian economists, in terms of ‘attributional’ variables (such as age, gender, academic position, tenure, scientific sub-discipline, geographical location, etc.), ‘relational’ variables (such as propensity to cooperate and the stability of cooperation patterns) and ‘positional’ variables (such as betweenness and closeness centrality indexes and clustering coefficients).